Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Visualizations for an exhibition

The Humanities lab are involved in a
really interesting project at the moment. We work together with the Historical
museum in Stockholm in preparing an exhibition that will start next year. Part
of it is about the battle of Visby in 1361. Visby is the largest city of Gotland,
which is a big island to the east of Sweden. In 1361 it was invaded by the
Danish army and in the middle of the summer there was a terrible battle just
outside of Visby. The local army, consisting mainly of peasants, boys and older
men, was no match for the professional and experienced Danish army and it is
estimated that 50% of the male population at Gotland at the time was killed in
the battle.

A skullwith 11damages fromthreedifferent weapons

The
exhibition willtell anexciting, but alsohorribleand nastystory
abouthow people was sacrificed,
died, and was buriedin severalmass gravesoutside thecity wall.
The skeletal remains in the graves bear witness of terrible wounds. What
happened on the battlefield? How was it tobe inthe
heat of battle, corneredbetweenthe high wallandthe Danish army?The Historical museum would like to envisage some of this and we are
helping out with part of the visualizations.

A chopped off foot

First we are
3d-scanning some of the skeletal remains with clear traces of different weapons. It is three skulls, one arm, one leg and a chopped off foot. We are using a NextEngine scanner to do this job. Just to make sure, we have taken a lot of pictures as well, that could be used in PhotoScan.

The museum has hired an expert in medieval weaponry and weapon techniques and
he has analyzed the wounds very carefully. Based on this analysis he could reenact the
most probable movements with the most probable weapons used to inflict the
different wounds. We, of course, put him in our motion
capture system to record these movements so we can use them as a base for the
animations that will be done to visualize what happened.